


Hold Fast and Let Go

by raiining



Category: The Avengers (2012)
Genre: Cancer Sucks, F/M, Fix-It, Gen, Grief/Mourning, M/M, Minor Character Death, Writing is free therapy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-07-26
Updated: 2012-07-26
Packaged: 2017-11-10 18:58:02
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,393
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/469599
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/raiining/pseuds/raiining
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>His mom had told him about the cancer six weeks into Phil's physiotherapy.  He'd spent the past month at the house, slowly building up his strength by weeding the garden and cutting the lawn.  Clint had come with him but had left that morning for a debrief in New York.  He'd told him he'd be back by midnight.  </p>
<p>Phil's mother had sat him in the kitchen and looked him in the eye.  She'd kissed him on the forehead when he snapped the pen he'd been holding in half, and told him not to worry about the tablecloth.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Hold Fast and Let Go

**Author's Note:**

> Writing is the best kind of free therapy. We've got someone in the hospital now and it's not going to be long and I just ... had to write this. 
> 
> Dedicated to everyone whose ever been touched by cancer. It sucks. And that's my professional medical opinion.

 

Clint hands Phil his blue tie.

He knots it when it's clear Phil's shaking too much to do it himself.

 

___

 

They'd never been a talk-on-the-phone kind of family. Phil always preferred short, sarcastic sentences to long drawn out conversations. His mom taught him that. But they would email at least once a week. Every two weeks, if Phil were undercover and couldn't get a secure connection. Phil liked to tell her about the people he worked with, and she'd keep him up to date on the family gossip. Once or twice a year he would get enough time off to visit, sometimes for Christmas but more often than not it would be some random week in July. It didn't matter. It had always been nice to come home.

 

____

 

Phil draws the line at putting on his own shoes. Clint ties the laces though. Phil watches him, on his knees, biting his lower lip in studious concentration, and feels so fucking grateful it's almost embarrassing.

 

____

 

Phil's mom had loved Clint the moment she'd laid eyes on him. Phil had been irrationally jealous when she had pulled him into a swift hug, kissed his temple and served him brownies (Maria had made them, so they'd been actually edible). He'd wanted to do that himself for years.

 

____

 

Phil's silent in the car while Clint drives them to the funeral home, and he's quiet during the ceremony itself. It's a nice ceremony. The minster had known her for years and has a few stories to tell, and then Phil's sister says a few words. After that Phil himself stands and walks to the podium. He only has a few lines to say, and they catch in his throat when he says them, but it's a good story and the audience - all family and a few close friends - laugh quietly. 

Clint cries though, quietly and without fanfare, and doesn't mind that Phil sees. It helps, a little. 

 

____

 

Phil's mother sat him down when he was thirteen and told him the birds and the bees, and the bees and the bees and the birds and the birds. Phil's father had groaned loudly in the background and rolled his eyes, but his mother had poked him once, hard, in the kidneys and he'd stopped. Maria got the same speech, almost line for line, and they'd hidden mortified from their parents for the rest of the day. 

Still, it had been ... nice. And when Phil, stuttering, brought his first boyfriend home for Anna Coulson to meet she had shook his hand and smiled, and Phil had known it was going to be okay.

 

___

 

Phil drives with Maria to the cemetery. Clint takes Joe and the kids in their car and it's nice, to have that time together. They hold hands, and it doesn't matter that Phil's never been able to tell her what he does for a living or that they haven't spent a holiday together in two years. She's still his sister. 

 

____

 

  
Clint had been reserved and quiet for about fifteen minutes in the Coulson Household before the low-level bickering and poking and general rowdiness that happened when you had three children under ten, four teenagers, Aunt Jody and Uncle Roy, Joe, Maria and Phil in the same general area, broke his reserve. By the end of the first afternoon he had taught Maria's children how to throw pens hard enough they stuck in a piece of cardboard, and that was only because Joe had (wisely) confiscated the knives.

Phil's dad had been the organized one. He'd died unexpectedly when Phil was eighteen and Anna would often look up to the ceiling and declare "Your father is laughing at me. Right now. I hate you all" at least once a week. With Clint there, she at least doubled that. 

 

____

 

In the cemetery Rosie starts to cry, loudly. She's too young to remember her grandmother, two years old and frightened by the mass of strange people, and Joe takes her away. They stand at the edge of the group and he holds her and talks to her quietly, calming her down. Maria looks stricken, and Phil holds her hand and squeezes tight. 

"I have pictures. For when she's older, I have - " she says, almost to herself. Then she turns to Phil and her face is stricken. "Oh god, Phil, all I have now are pictures," and she's shaking so hard he can't do anything but hold her by the shoulders and let her go. 

 

____

 

Phil's mom had been a brilliant writer and an excellent cook but she couldn't bake worth a dime. She'd lock herself in her office for days at a time and forget to do things like pay for electricity. Phil started coming home on weekends from college to help sort the bills. When it came time to renew the mortgage he took a day off from his summer job to help her go through her options while she did his laundry and helped edit his essay on politics in the Middle East.

The day he'd gotten into S.H.I.E.L.D. she bought him his first suit. He'd told her he got a job in an insurance office. She'd nodded and smiled and said she was proud he chose to do something quiet with his life, and brought his dad's old holster to the fitting.

 

___

 

After the burial there's a family lunch. Everyone brings something and Clint bakes cookies and makes a delicious cold pasta salad. Joe can't cook but he wields a mean burger and Phil's put on ice duty. It's August and hot and sweaty but people linger, sharing stories. It's different than after Phil's father had died. That had been shocking and unexpected, and Phil remembers standing in this backyard feeling numb as people walked around shaking their heads. 

It's not easier, now, death is never _easy_. But they'd had some time to get used to the idea. It makes some things simpler.

 

___

 

His mom had told him about the cancer six weeks into Phil's physiotherapy. He'd spent the past month at the house, slowly building up his strength by weeding the garden and cutting the lawn. Clint had come with him but had left that morning for a debrief in New York. He'd told him he'd be back by midnight. 

Phil's mother had sat him in the kitchen and looked him in the eye. She'd kissed him on the forehead when he snapped the pen he'd been holding in half, and told him not to worry about the tablecloth. 

 

___

 

Phil and Clint help clean up the backyard while Maria and Joe put the kids to bed. Aunt Allison and everyone had tidied a little before they left, but there are still a few plastic plates to throw away, a couple of dishes to wash up. Clint knows where everything goes by now, how the cutlery sits in the uppermost drawer but the serving utensils go into in a basket under the sink. He cleans out the coffee machine and makes them a fresh pot, because they're S.H.I.E.L.D. agents and they laugh in the face of caffeine. 

They sit in the living room with Maria and Joe, and they don't turn on the news. Instead Joe produces a stack of playing cards and starts cutting out everything under nine. Phil would have thought he and Clint would have the advantage at Euchre, but Maria and Joe have raised four children and apparently can speak volumes with their eyebrows. Despite himself, Phil is impressed. 

 

___

 

Phil and Clint had gone every Saturday to visit, if only for a couple of hours. Chemo is basically everything fun is not, but they did what they could. Maria lived in town and went over every day, and Phil felt guilty because he couldn't do the same. His mother had rolled her eyes at him and ordered Clint to poke him in the kidneys. 

Clint had, because his husband's an asshole. It had hurt. 

He didn't bring it up again, but he made sure Maria had both his cell numbers and Clint's, and Natasha's for good measure. And when he could, he got an extra day off and headed home. It didn't feel like enough, and he knew Nick would give him the time off if he wanted, but Phil's mom had never been good dealing with people underfoot. He didn't want to be a burden.

 

___

 

  
After cards Phil thinks maybe they're all tired enough to sleep, but he still lays awake in his old room, staring at the ceiling. Clint lies beside him and links their palms together, though he dozes for an hour or two at a time. Phil holds his hand. When he finally closes his eyes it's four or five in the morning, but at least he doesn't dream.

 

___

 

When Stark had found out he'd dragged Banner down to his lab and hadn't come out for five days. Phil had finally had to go in after them. He'd found Tony with three electronic pencils stuck behind one ear and a leg that couldn't stop twitching. Bruce had fallen asleep on a bench in the corner. 

"I can fix this. I know I can fix this," Tony had said, practically vibrating with manic energy. There had been holographic calculations floating through the labspace and he'd been elbow-deep in the schematics for some kind of nanobot. But Phil could tell from the amount of half-discarded machinery and the way the calculations trailed off at the corners that he hadn't come up with a solution.

"It's cancer," Phil told him, quietly. "It's complicated. I don't expect you to hand me a miracle."

Tony had looked pained. "Miracles are my specialty, I - "

"It's okay," Phil had said, and then "Tony," because he hadn't been listening. That had gotten his attention. "I won't blame you if you can't fix this."

It took another three days, an intervention from Clint and another from Steve, but Tony had finally left his lab. He still looked vaguely guilty whenever Phil and Clint left for the weekend, though, and Bruce hardly seemed better. But Phil had meant it.

Cancer was complicated, and Phil's mother had metastatic disease. He'd known the chances of recovery were low. 

Tony still donated a ridiculous amount of money to cancer research, though, and he spent the next year working on a new kind of hand-held PET scanner. He'd whip it out and scan people randomly, at least once a month, and more if there had been recent radiological exposure. 

Phil always smiled and didn't say anything. He understood thoughtful neuroses and besides, it made Clint feel better, too. 

 

___

 

The next morning there are papers to fill out and lawyer's to meet. Phil and Maria have a heated discussion about the house, but Maria's stubborn and already owns a beautiful property outside the city proper. 

"She _wanted_ you to have it," Maria tells him, eyes flashing once before they soften and she looks over at Clint. He's standing in the back doing a fairly good job of blending into the wall. "Both of you."

There isn't much Phil can say to that. 

 

___

 

It had taken three home visits and more emails than Phil could count but his mother had finally cornered him in her kitchen and demanded to know when Phil was going to drag Clint to the altar and make a proper man out of him.

Phil had hated the blush that rose in his cheeks but he never _could_ lie to his mother and he'd been forced to confess, before her incredulous gaze, that they weren't together. 

"Bullshit," she had said, and Phil should have given up right then, because Anna Coulson was a die-hard romantic and as stubborn as Phil or Maria and not particularly subtle. 

One phone call and three hours later Clint had burst through the door, wild eyed and frantic, and before Phil could get his head together (and out of the sink, because plumbing had not exactly been his first calling) Phil's mother had locked them in the kitchen and refused to let them out until they "Sorted this out, seriously. Your father is laughing at you - even _I_ was never this stupid and he courted me for _years_."

 

___

 

Phil and Clint don't exactly move out of Stark Tower, but some of their possessions do migrate to Phil's mother's house. He and Clint spend weekends renovating a little - they update the master bath and paint the kitchen. Phil finds the way Clint holds paint chips to the living room walls adorable. They don't make anything a secret, and gradually the rest of the Avengers feel comfortable enough to come over and start helping out. Tony takes over deck construction, but miraculously keeps things simple, hammering things out with actual boards and nails instead of adding flashy metal that would throw off the rest of the house. 

Steve turns out to be actually good at plumbing and Phil gratefully hands over that responsibility, and Bruce knows a thing or two about kitchen appliances. Natasha likes the backyard, and more than once they wake up on a Sunday morning to see her laying on a towel in the yard, soaking up the early morning sun. 

It becomes nice, comfortable, but Phil still pauses sometimes in the - in their - kitchen and has to breathe. He misses his mother every day. No one but Clint knows that he still writes her emails, even if he never sends them, because she'd always liked to know what was happening in his life and he's never been one for talking to headstones.

But it gets easier, over time, even if he doesn't want it to. And Maria and Joe come over occasionally, and Phil finally introduces them to the rest of the Avengers, and eventually even Nick comes down one Wednesday afternoon to sit on the deck and have a beer. 

Looking around him, Phil feels thankful for his life, for this. And when Clint attempts to teach six year old Rosie how to fire an arrow and almost causes mass property damage, Phil has to shake his head.

His mother is laughing at him. And somewhere, he hopes, his father is poking her in the kidneys.

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> Someone somewhere in some fic that I remember was really good had a line about 'if you locked Tony and Bruce in a lab for enough days they'd probably cure cancer' and I just ... really wish that were true. But I don't think it is. 
> 
> It's ... complicated. And heavy. And it sucks because it's chaos. It's our original enemy, and despite the massive amounts of money we put into research and treatment and despite how far we've come ... it's always going to be there. It was there in the beginning and we aren't going to outrun it anytime soon. 
> 
> But there *are* answers and we *have* made progress and I see that every day. But sometimes it's not enough. And then we have to deal and thats ... hard. 
> 
>  
> 
> *hugs everyone* 
> 
>  
> 
> So here's to dealing. Go team. :(


End file.
